No Ghouls Allowed (24 page)

Sarah stopped speaking and I had to work over and over again to hold back a sob. My
poor, poor mother. What horrors had she endured that summer?

“And then?” Beau asked gently.

Sarah closed her eyes, whispered, “I’m so sorry, Dee,” and then more clearly she said,
“And then DeeDee killed Everett with the croquet mallet.”

Heath took me from the room and held me as I cried and cried. My tears were bitter,
and heartbroken, and angry, and so, so sad. To my knowledge, my mother had never mentioned
anything to anyone about what’d happened, because if Daddy had ever learned what Glenn
Porter had done to her when she was just a child, he would’ve killed him dead.

Finally Beau came out and told us the rest of the story. “She says that after DeeDee
struck Everett with the mallet, she swung the thing again and busted the planchette.
The girls then kept their heads enough to pick up some of the evidence, the planchette
and the sugar bowl, and DeeDee snuck out of the house with them while Sarah planted
the mallet in her brother’s room, then joined everyone outside just in time for lunch,
which is why no one noticed her missing. Later, Sarah says she purposely spilled some
punch on her dress, and her mother took her to her bedroom to pick out something new
to wear, and that’s when they both stumbled on the body of Everett, or at least that’s
what Regina Porter thought.

“Sarah told her mother that she’d seen Everett and Glenn fighting earlier in the day,
which just by coincidence they had been, and Regina went up the stairs to look for
her son, only to find the bloody mallet in his room and assume that Glenn Porter was
responsible for murdering Everett.”

“That’s some pretty clever thinking on the part of an eight-year-old,” I said, still
feeling weak in the knees.

“It is,” Beau agreed. “But Sarah has always been the brightest of the Porters. She
skipped several grades from what I remember and had a full ride to some fancy school
up North when she had her first nervous breakdown and became something of an invalid.”

“I wonder if Sarah’s issues had less to do with a weak mind and more to do with the
struggle to hold inside all those terrible secrets and memories,” I said.

“What happened to her and DeeDee should never happen to any little girls,” Heath said
bitterly. He looked mad enough to kill someone himself.

“So Regina Porter thought her son had killed Everett,” I said, getting back to the
story. “Wouldn’t he have just denied it?”

“I’m sure he did, but whatever Regina believed, she never confessed it to Sarah. Instead,
she shut closed the door to the playroom, and told Sarah to sit on her bed and not
to utter one single word. About twenty minutes later, a worker arrived to board up
the door leading to the playroom and cover it in drywall. He worked for several hours,
and Sarah watched him from the bed. He never looked at her and he never spoke to her,
and he never asked her why he was covering up a door in her room—he just did the job,
painted the wall, and left. The next morning, Regina opened the door of Sarah’s room
accompanied by Sheriff Maskill—who was sheriff before Kogan—and Regina told the sheriff
that her daughter Sarah had the flu and had spent much of the previous day in bed.
By this time Sarah was catching on that her mother was telling people Everett had
gone missing, not that he’d been killed inside Porter Manor. The sheriff didn’t even
ask Sarah if she’d seen Everett; he just nodded to her and they left her alone.

“She says that a day or so later, she overheard Regina talking to DeeDee’s mother.
She told her that DeeDee was not allowed to come back to Porter Manor, and she was
to have nothing to do with her daughter or the family ever again.

“Sarah isn’t sure if Regina ever knew the real truth. More than likely she didn’t
want any of Sarah’s friends in the house where they might smell something foul coming
through the wall. The staff was also dismissed under the pretense that Regina thought
one of them might be responsible for Everett’s disappearance, and if she couldn’t
identify which servant it might’ve been, she was going to fire them all.

“The family existed in that big house for over a year before they hired any new staff.
She says that’s how long it took for the smell to finally leave her room.”

I wiped my eyes and sniffled loudly. “She had no choice,” I insisted. I meant my mother
and Breslow seemed to know it.

“Of course she didn’t, Mary Jane.”

My lip trembled. “This is gonna kill Daddy.”

Breslow was twirling the brim of his hat between his fingers. “I don’t see any reason
it should get back to Mr. Holliday.”

I looked at him hopefully. “You won’t tell him?”

Breslow eyed me sympathetically. “I think it’s like Glenn Porter said: if there’s
no body, there’s no crime.” Then he made a point to glance at his phone. “Would you
look at that? I forgot to hit the
RECORD
button, and anyway, I didn’t read Sarah her rights, so her confession wouldn’t be
admissible, and anything you two overheard is just hearsay. No, I think that Everett
Sellers is gonna remain a missing-persons case from here on out, unless a body shows
up, which hopefully it won’t.”

I wanted to hug Breslow, but settled for putting my hand on his arm and mouthing,
“Thank you.”

We waited in the hallway for a bit until I had collected myself, and then we slowly
made our way down the corridor.

Just when we got outside, my own cell rang. It was Gilley. “Yo!” Gil said. “I think
I hit pay dirt.”

I put the phone on speaker and the three of us huddled close. “Go for it,” I told
him.

“Okay, so, first I looked into Scoffland. Now, according to tax records, he did a
little work for Glenn Porter about five years ago, but it was a small job, and he
was paid five grand and that was the end of it. I was hoping for something more current,
but there’s nothing. There’re also no phone calls logged between Porter’s phone and
Scoffland’s.”

Breslow cocked an eyebrow. “How were you able to get phone records?” he asked sharply.

I waved at him impatiently. “If he tells you, you won’t like it, Deputy, so how about,
just for the sake of putting Porter behind bars for Scoffland’s murder, we ignore
that for now?”

Breslow frowned but gave a reluctant nod. “Okay, go on,” he said to Gilley.

“I was ready to stop at the small job Scoffland did for Glenn five years ago, but
the man kept the best tax records I’ve ever seen, so I went back in history looking
for anything that might connect him to the Porters, and wouldn’t you know it? Up until
about fifteen years ago, Scoffland submitted annual invoices to them for the exact
amount of twenty thousand dollars a year.”

“Fifteen years ago,” Breslow said. “That’s around the time that Regina Porter died.”

“Wanna know when Scoffland began submitting invoices?” Gil sang.

“Let me guess,” said Heath. “Nineteen seventy-one.”

“Ding, ding, ding!” said Gil. “We have a winner! And by winner I mean that in August
of nineteen seventy-one there was an invoice for six hundred dollars, which was promptly
paid, and about a week later, there was a second invoice for twenty thousand dollars,
and that was also promptly paid.”

I gasped. “He was the worker who covered up the door to the playroom!”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Gil said. “He must’ve figured out that Everett was behind
the door he sealed over at Porter Manor on the day that Everett disappeared, and he
blackmailed Mr. and Mrs. Porter for years.”

“So what was the purpose of going to the house the night he was murdered?” I asked.
“If he was going to try to blackmail Glenn, then why would he uncover the door, open
it up, put the planchette there, and cover it back up?”

“That’s for you fools to figure out,” said Gilley. “But hold off on that until I tell
you what else I found.”

“What?” we all said in unison.

“Well, I looked into anything spooky that might’ve been going on in Valdosta which
could explain the Sandman’s presence—”

“We don’t need that anymore, Gil,” I interrupted. Heath eyed me curiously and I explained,
“The planchette was destroyed back in ’seventy-one. Sarah said Mama destroyed it. . . .”
My voice trailed off as I realized what I’d just said.

“Destroyed it?” Gil said. “Then how did it show up in the playroom?”

“Hold on,” I said, quickly tapping my screen to get back to my photos. After pulling
up the one of the planchette, I said, “This is either the same planchette or a copy
good enough to call the Sandman up.”

“Oh, it’s an original,” Gil said. “Remember, I showed it to my historian buddy, and
we were able to see the faint outline of Padesco’s signature carved into the silver.
If it weren’t for the dents around the rim of the crystal, the thing would’ve been
in mint condition.”

I used my fingers to expand the image and do a close-up of the planchette. Sure enough
there were small nicks and a few dents to the silver near where the crystal was. “So,
maybe Mama destroyed the crystal, but not the planchette, and that was good enough
to lock away the Sandman,” I said.

“It would’ve been,” Gil said. “According to Padesco’s journal, which I’ve had a great
time reading through, it takes a perfectly unflawed crystal with fairly soft vibrations
to be able to create a window big enough for something as powerful as the Sandman.
The original crystal would have been amethyst, no less than sixteen or seventeen carats,
and it would have had to have been absolutely flawless, which is a seriously rare
find.”

“So someone duplicated the gem,” I said.

“Yeah, but who?” Heath said.

“Don’t know,” Gilley said. “But I know who it’s not.”

“Who is it not?” the three of us said in unison.

“Sarah Porter.”

I wanted to say “Of course,” but I was curious about Gilley’s reasoning, so I said,
“Why do you say that?”

“About eight months ago a maid who worked for her started posting videos to her Facebook
page showing objects being tossed around Sarah’s house of their own free will. In
one of the videos, you can even see Sarah Porter huddling under her piano, crying
hysterically. Shortly after that, the maid quit, saying the house had suddenly become
haunted and she wanted no part. A little while after that, Sarah began checking herself
into the mental clinic for long weekends. At one point her house was even listed for
sale, but no one wanted it, so it came back off the market. Oh, and I also found a
power of attorney for Sarah held by her brother, so if you guys think he’s trying
to hurt her with the Sandman, I’d make sure she’s got some protection until you can
shut that thing down.”

The three of us looked back toward the hospital. Sarah hadn’t mentioned anything about
that, at least not with me and Heath in the room. “Did she say anything about the
Sandman coming back to you, Beau?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head and looking a little shocked.

“That son of a bitch Porter,” Heath hissed, a flash of anger returning to his eyes.

But then the most random thought came into my head about an e-mail Linda had sent
me a year earlier when she was struggling so much to deal with her husband’s affair
and the divorce. There was a line in that e-mail that played across my mind’s eye,
and it changed all of my thinking. “What?” Heath asked me, and I realized I’d been
staring down the street as so much began to come together.

“Gil,” I said, already heading toward Beau’s car.

“Yeah?”

“We’ll have to call you back.” With that, I hung up and motioned for the boys to get
in without any further explanation because I needed to work through the sequence of
events on my own. I pointed in the direction I wanted to go and Beau pulled out of
the space. It took us only two minutes to get to the destination and I got out of
the car, shrugging out of my fishing vest, and tossing it on the seat. I didn’t feel
like I needed it for what I was about to do. I then stood for a moment looking up
at the giant elm tree that I swore I’d stood under just a few days earlier. “Where
are we?” Heath asked as he came up next to me. I noticed he’d taken off his vest too.

“My grandparents’ house.”

“Looks empty,” he told me.

“It’s owned by a nice couple. He’s an administrator at the hospital and she works
there as a nurse.” I turned slightly and saw the giant building we’d just come from
just over the trees to my right. “I met them the last time I was home and missing
Mama. Behind here there’s a trail that leads down to the river, and she and I used
to take long walks together there.”

I didn’t explain more than that; I simply headed up the side of the house to where
the yard met the woods and the trail. The three of us walked in silence and for the
second time since I’d been home, I felt the spirit of my mother come close to me and
wrap me in the most comforting, loving quilt of energy.

I spoke to her in my mind as I walked, telling her how sorry I was for all that she’d
been through as a little girl. How proud I was of how brave she’d been. How amazed
and blessed I felt to have had her as a mother. The whole time I thought she did nothing
but listen and love me, and for just a moment, for just a tiny second, I forgot that
she had crossed over, and believed that she was there with me, walking to a place
we used to often visit.

At last we arrived at a large boulder that butted up next to a giant elm. I climbed
up the boulder just as I’d watched my mother do every time we came here. “What’s in
here?” she’d say, leaning in toward a hollowed-out section of the tree’s trunk. I’d
laugh and take wild guesses. “A bunny! A plate of cookies! A magic carpet!”

Mama would lean her head in the large hole and pretend to look around, and then she’d
pull it out and say, “Why, no, love dumplin’! It’s not any of that!” She’d then put
her hand in really far, which told me the hollow was fairly deep, and then she’d pull
her fist out, open her palm, and there would be all sorts of individually wrapped
candies. “All I found in there were these!”

I loved coming here with her. She always made each moment with her feel magical.

“Hey, now,” Heath said with a bit of alarm. “Deputy, you see that? Is that blood?”

I closed my eyes on top of that boulder, the memory of my mother atop it fading as
I thought about poor Linda. I knew she’d come here. I knew Mama had told her all about
what’d happened that day, how she’d hidden the planchette in this hollowed-out tree,
but she’d kept that sugar dish on her vanity to remind her of what she’d done. Of
the life she’d taken. Of the penance she’d have to pay one day.